On Comments On Current Events, Part 2

Today we take a quick glance at some of the bluster coming from the nation's "liberty" enthusiasts following the incident in Connecticut. Again, from Facebook:

Ohhh, there's that word again. Freedom. It's one of those weasel words that people like George W. Bush like to brandish as an unquestionable cause or an irrefutable justification. It can mean pretty much anything and so, rhetorically, it's often meaningless.

It is likely meaningless in the practical sense, too.

Feeling free is another matter. Nobody likes to feel that their actions are directly restricted, especially against their will, especially by somebody else. Video game enthusiasts scream and gnash their teeth when politicians suggest outlawing game sales to certain age groups. I screamed and gnashed my teeth when the Obama administration successfully pushed for banning the sale of (most) flavored cigarettes. Gun owners scream and gnash their teeth when somebody so much as suggests a restriction on clip sizes.

The argued aim of our libertarian and second-amendment enthusiast friends is more freedom for more people, what they actually mean translates to some jargon like "as few negatively-experienced circumstantial restrictions on behavior for as many people as can be managed." Now that we have a better idea what they actually mean, I think another look at their argument is deserved.

The funny thing about this line of reasoning is that it only applies to social sanctions imposed by a governing body. If the government tells somebody that they can't or shouldn't do something, a wrong is being committed. A "freedom" is being quashed.

But when a person's "freedom" is restricted as the result of another individual exercising his own "freedom," it's apparently a different case altogether.

Giving an industrialist the "freedom" to dump as much chemical waste into the river of their choice restricts the "freedom" of the people living downriver to enjoy and use the river as they might otherwise see fit. Giving assholes like me the "freedom" to smoke in a restaurant restricts the "freedom" of the other patrons to enjoy a meal without breathing in the toxic fumes I'm coughing out. Giving Americans the "freedom" to easily purchase bullet-spraying automatic weapons restricts the "freedom" of unarmed Americans to enjoy an environment in which there's a minimal probability of bullets whizzing in their direction.

In these cases one rarely hears objections from those voices who cry foul when gun control is mentioned.

But do ask someone at the scene of one of our regular massacres how "free" they felt when the gunman of the day was unloading clips into the crowd.

But it doesn't have to be this way, we're told by some partisans. If more people, as many people as possible, are "choosing" to purchase and carry firearms, then there's much less a chance of gunfire breaking out. You must exercise your liberty to purchase and carry firearms to ensure that nobody's liberty is restricted by the use of firearms.

We want to be able to carry guns, so we strongly suggest that the rest of you carry guns, too.

That isn't just hypocritical. It's tyrannical.

On Comments On Current Events, Part 1

All day Friday, the only thing anyone on the Internet wanted to type about was the incident in Connecticut. Of all the commentary I've parsed, my favorite has been:

Take that, us!

Judging by the contents of my Facebook and Twitter feeds tonight, our friend's prediction was accurate.

This demonstrates one reason why joyless fuddy-duddies like me complain that the Internet and the new mass media landscape are reducing people's attention spans. (Because it is, because it does.) Social movements can't gain much momentum if The Issue of the Day (whatever it may be) is contending with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, video games, etc. for people's attention.

Oh, but look at all of the the #guncontrol vociferations we've retweeted! Of course we care! Of course we feel strongly about this and want it to change!

Feeling strongly and vocalizing about a social problem will never be enough to make it go away. Posting fiery comments on Facebook and Twitter, signing petitions, and sending copied email texts to your congressman makes little to no difference. Whether the issue is gun control, foreign policy, reproductive rights, etc., getting anything done requires groundwork.

I speculate that it's hard to muster up and sustain the kind of ardency and outrage that compels a person to put aside what he's doing, change his routine, and dedicate himself to activism (because activism, whether of the personal or organized sort, is pretty much the only way social change is ever deliberately effected) when (a) TV, video games, Facebook, and the rest of that list are constantly and perpetually pulling his attention in different directions (b) the use of these media is tremendously reinforcing, making it less likely that the user's behavior will deviate toward a direction away from them (as activism often requires).

(How many dedicated activists, do you suppose, play World of Warcraft on a regular basis?)

Again -- this is speculation, and only speculation. I can't confidently assert that the ease of mass communication and potential for mobilization offered by social media are offset by its general sedative effect. Nor can I say with any certainty that the public of the early 21st century is actually more opiated than the public of the early 20th or 19th centuries, but something tells me that the Internet, television, and games are a much more potent tranquilizer than the classical diet of theater, dime novels, and booze.

Yeah, yeah -- I'm not saying it should be everyone's responsibility to go out and save/change the world. But it would be nice if people, instead of just posting about it on the Internet, asked themselves what they could do, as individuals, to help fix the thing they're complaining about. And I wonder if a social environment so saturated with such powerful multimedia distractions inhibits the fostering of focused and committed activists.

Speaking of escapism, here's another comic. My name is Patrick (hi, Patrick!) and I'm part of a problem.

Zombies for Sale

Scotus Week continues here in the States, and while the main event (the healthcare reform ruling) won't come cartwheeling into the ring until tomorrow, Monday's first act caused a considerable hubub. There was the surprising draw match in the matter of Arizona v. United States, but what raised my eyebrow (and blood pressure) was the United States Supreme Court's reversal of the Montana Supreme Court's decision in Western Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Attorney General of Montana. In a nutshell: the Supreme Court still believes its Citizens United ruling was a fine thing, and that a state government with a contrary law on its books needs to get with the program.

You've certainly heard enough wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the Supreme Court's pernicious decision that the United States would be better off as a de facto oligarchy, so I'll try not to do any more bitching here. But I do bitch about it. And sometimes my bitching enters the ears of younger folks who, for whatever reason, aren't constantly wringing their hands and reloading CNN.com's frontpage every twenty minutes. Occasionally these kids will ask me what I'm screaming about and want to know the reason why Citizens United tends to make people hysterical.

What's the story with Citizens United? Well, it basically entitles tremendously wealthy entities to make indefinitely tremendous political expenditures. In order to keep pace with their opponents on the campaign trail, politicians will be cuddling up even closer to business interests in exchange for donations.

Well, gosh! But what do all these donations buy? Well, they buy. You see, it takes a lot of. Hmm. Well. This is a good question.

Let's get our facts together here with some help from OpenSecrets.org!

According to a breakdown of campaign expenditures in 2008, of the $6.53 million spent on communications in the 2008 presidential elections, about $3.6 million went towards "broadcast media," i.e. television spots. And whoever spends the most money on television adverts is probably going to win the election. Small block quote from part of an election roundup:

The historic election of 2008 re-confirmed one truism about American democracy: Money wins elections.

From the top of the ticket, where Barack Obama declined public financing for the first time since the system's creation and went on to amass a nearly two-to-one monetary advantage over John McCain, to congressional races throughout the nation, the candidate with the most money going into Election Day emerged victorious in nearly every contest.

In 93 percent of House of Representatives races and 94 percent of Senate races that had been decided by mid-day Nov. 5, the candidate who spent the most money ended up winning, according to a post-election analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The findings are based on candidates' spending through Oct. 15, as reported to the Federal Election Commission.

Continuing a trend seen election cycle after election cycle, the biggest spender was victorious in 397 of 426 decided House races and 30 of 32 settled Senate races. On Election Day 2006, top spenders won 94 percent of House races and 73 percent of Senate races. In 2004, 98 percent of House seats went to the biggest spender, as did 88 percent of Senate seats.

There's a rarely-discussed subtext here, and a question that isn't usually posed. Why does this happen? Why in the world should the candidate with the most television commercials win the election? That's not how the system was built, was it? 

Why would TV adverts (or robocalls and and junk mail campaigns for that matter) be the determinants of a presidential election if the voters -- whose civic obligation it is to participate responsibly in said election -- are keeping abreast of current events, the accompanying issues, and the candidates' positions on them, like good citizens are supposed to do?

And it is not difficult to keep track of this stuff. The debates are all televised. We have armies of journalists following both campaign trails and investigating both candidates' histories, and they're all trying to one-up each other in bringing new information to the public's attention. And let's not forget that we're living in an age when finding a candidate's (any candidate's) stance on an issue of concern is as easy as typing (for instance) "romney on emissions" into Google and clicking the "search" button.

What person who knows his* own convictions, has determined which issues supersede the others in their importance to him, and has done his homework on the candidates, their backgrounds, and their pledges would be swayed in one direction or the other by an unctuous attack ad? For that matter, why would he need someone calling him or knocking on his door to remind him to cast his vote on election day?

Because these people don't determine our elections. Elections in America are determined by Americans. God help us.

Political campaigns spend oceans of cash on television adverts because all the data indicates that elections are determined by what strategists euphemise as "low-information voters:" the tens of millions of reality TV-watching, Budweiser-drinking, food court-plodding dunderheads who can be counted on to agree with whomever speaks loudest and to vote for the guy whose campaign ad they saw most recently (if they vote at all) because they can't be bothered to be distracted from their distractions. These are the people the campaigns need to reach in order to win, and they can do so most effectively by buying up more commercial time than their opponents.

Political organizations wouldn't be spending millions on flimflam if they didn't have very good reason to believe that the voting-age citizens upon whom an election depends are extremely susceptible to flimflam.

Yeah, well. What do you expect? People are stupid.

No! Shut up! They don't have to be. But we build them that way, and so they are.

This is a talk for another time, though.

You have to admit it's a very nice little game that's been arranged, though. You have a cadre of humungous multinational businesses and industries whose products, services, and collateral runoff make and keep Americans dull, disinterested, and tranquilized. (Whether this is by design or as a side effect varies on a case by case basis and is another conversation entirely.) Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, these entities can pump as much money into presidential campaigns as they please. The election effort becomes a contest between candidates to curry favor with enough of these entities to afford to broadcast their "messages" (vote for me because vote for me) to the largest percentage of the same masses that said entities have systematically zombified and rendered otherwise inaccessible. Whoever buys the most zombie votes then assumes his new position of power, which he uses to repay his obligation to the entities by helping them achieve a further consolidation of their power.

You'd almost suspect it had been orchestrated, like some sort of political Magic: the Gathering combo. But it's more likely that things just tend to work out for people when they're already controlling most of everything.

* Yes, yes, I know I use the male pronoun as a default, and I'm aware that it's exclusive on the implicit assumption that the voting "person" is male. But "his or her" is clunky and "their" is incorrect. Someday I will switch it up and default to female pronouns for a while.

Stuck in My Craw File #429520: Walden, the Videogame

The Onion, America's finest satirical journal, has been really spot on for the last couple of years. Remember that piece about the grotesque new MacBook? How could you forget it? The one about the new Six Flags rollercoaster based on a miserable codependent relationship with a woman named "Deborah?" Priceless. And what about the story about a bunch of University of Southern California academics receiving $40,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to design a video game based on Henry David Thoreau's Walden? Har!

Oh, wait. That last one wasn't The Onion. It was TIME.

Well. Let's talk about Walden, a Game. It's the only way I will be able to get over it.

Composing a more substantive response to this news than ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING was a greater challenge than I thought it would be, likely because the incongruity between what's written in Walden and some fan's idea to make a video game about it should be so searingly obvious to anyone who has so much as read the book's back cover, and in so little need of explanation as to actually defy explanation. But as I am of the belief that one is better off not holding any convictions unless he can articulate and account for them, I suppose I'm obligated to scrutinize the anatomy of my knee and its peculiar jerkings.

Question one: what's this Walden book about, anyhow?

In brief: this guy Henry David Thoreau, a sort of libertarian hippie type, believes that there's too much bullshit in the modern world ("modern" meaning 1840-1850) and its outstanding effect is a population that's widely unhappy and dull. Thoreau posits that a happier and richer life would be one lived with a minimum of unnecessary bullshit, and to test this idea he goes out to live by himself in a little shack in the woods by Walden pond, where all he has to worry about are securing and maintaining food and shelter. He finds that when one lives deliberately and severs as much "civilized" nonsense from his life as possible, a kind of lucidity follows, tuning him in to the essential sublime brilliance in all things, et cetera et cetera.

So from the beginning: this is a piece of literature whose main argument is that people would be happier shedding the trappings of technology and engaging more directly and personally in their transactions with the world. And now there are some people, people who have presumably read this book more than once, who want to turn it into a video game. The NEA is giving them $40,000 in taxpayer money to do it.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING? SERIOUSLY ARE YOU ACTUA

So I guess my question is what's the bloody point? I'm imagining something like Animal Crossing (the most depressing game in the world) without the cutesy visuals, and with snippets from Thoreau's writing wedged between the completion and assigning of fetch quests. My personal hope is that players who manage to achieve a 100% (or 200% as the case sometimes may be) completion rate in Walden, a Game are treated to a special message à la Guitar Hero à la South Park: "GO OUTSIDE."

On that note, may I suggest a substitute to playing Walden, a Game? 

GOING OUTSIDE.

Of course everyone should spend time in nature; but not all of us are able to set aside our lives for the time it would take to conduct an experiment like Thoreau’s, says the game's lead designer.

Fair enough. But do you suppose Thoreau would prefer that those interested in his ideas and legacy spent five, ten, twenty hours hunched before a computer screen indoors, following his pretend footsteps in a pretend forest; or that they tore themselves away from all the screens in their lives for just a few minutes and went outside? Found their own special places? Thought their own thoughts? Experienced their own moments of revelation?

Would anybody truly be willing to argue that someone who goes outside for half and hour and practices a deliberate mindfulness of his surroundings experiences less of nature than he would by playing a video game about experiencing nature in his sterile, climate-controlled, artificially-lit bedroom or cubicle for the same amount of time?

Walden, a game [sic] posits a new genre of play, in which reflection and insight play an important role in the player experience. While traveling the virtual world of Walden, the player applies themselves to both daily task of maintaining the basic aspects of life at Walden Pond, as well as having the opportunity to focus on the deeper meaning behind events that transpire in the world. By attending to these events, the player is able to gain insight into the natural world, and into connections that permeate the experience of life at Walden.

I don't think you can gain real experiential knowledge about nature and the world through pseudo-experience. That's not how it works.

You want to talk about the great outdoors? It reeks.

Nature is full of awful stenches. Nature is uncomfortable. Nature is mud and hairy coyote shit and vomit balls with fractured rodent bones poking out. Nature is rotting logs, grubs, maggots, and mold spores. Nature is a cloud of flies jumping from a half-decomposed animal carcass to a dung pile to your cheek. Nature is walking into spiderwebs face first, sap and evergreen needles stuck between your fingers, tripping on tree roots, and falling into poison ivy. Nature is blackberry seeds stuck between your teeth, trees with four-inch thorns protruding from their trunks, gnats flying into your eyes, poisonous snakes, ticks buried in your skin, and bears taking your food. Nature is sweating, shivering, bee stings, briars, and wet feet in the winter. Nature is pissing against a tree, shitting in the bushes, and wiping your ass with leaves.

The first step toward achieving that transcendental wonder for the wild world is to appreciate the fact that the living part of planet Earth did not make itself with any regard for you, your comfort, or your capacity to comprehend what it is and what it does. This is not something you can really know until you've been out in the thick of things (I never really grasped it myself until going on a camping trip that very nearly killed me), and the thick of things cannot be conveyed by a virtual "environment" that only communicates to your visual and auditory senses.

The potential for those sublime moments of peace and truth is always there, but you can't really receive them without first exposing yourself to the grime, stench, and discomfort. Supposing your can get the full taste of one without sampling the other can only be called shallow and shortsighted. It's the difference between diving into the pond and wading at the edge with your trouser legs pulled up to your shins. It's the difference between the living, growing, respiring thing and the mass-produced polystyrene image of it. It's the difference between doing something and playing a video game about it.

If you want to learn about nature, go outside and pay attention. You don't even need to be out in the middle of nowhere to do it. Nature is everywhere. The planet you're standing on is nature. Find a public park, a vacant lot, or really any place where the weeds are pushing up  through the concrete, and just pay attention to what's going on around you.

It might take a few minutes. It might take a few visits. But it's happening.

If you want a kid to understand nature, take him outside. Don't make him play Going Outside: the Game.

If you want a kid to read Thoreau, make him read Thoreau. If he is incapable of absorbing ideas that aren't being delivered through a video game, then Walden probably isn't for him anyway.

What we have here is a video game that's probably not going to be much fun, replicates something most people can do without a computer (going outside), and is designed to convey a set of ideas that you can simply go ahead and read without any intermediary Animal Crossing nonsense. It's basically pointless. And given that it's based on a book admonishing humanity for all the inessential nonsense it lugs around with it, Walden, a Game seems doubly pointless, and doubly demeaning to the spirit in which Thoreau wrote it.

The NEA grant is just insult added to insult -- Walden, a Game ain't a $40,000 idea, and with so many austerity hawks in Congress looking for programs to cut, the NEA picked a very bad time to endorse such a ridicule- and publicity-prone waste of treasure.

"Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."

-- Abraham Kaplan

The media scintillates with stories about the (somewhat belated) backlash to Trayvon Martin's murder. Editorial cartoonists are taking this as another opportunity to point out that this is what happens when we have lax gun control laws and a cavalier "we mustn't let the bastard get away" attitude.

Even though the analogy in the last post might not be somewhat disproportionate, I find myself returning to it -- especially when we're hearing reports that both the CIA and Mossad agree that evidence of Iranian intent to build nuclear weapons is somewhat much less than conclusive.

Shoot and then justify. Bomb first and sift through the rubble for evidence of probable cause later.

Would it be in poor taste to suggest a thematic parallel between Trayvon Martin's pointless murder by a paranoid, gun-toting vigilante asshole and the hundred thousand-something Iraqi civilians killed since the United States invaded, citing WMD reports coming from unreliable intelligence? Both suggest a gross deficiency of character in the culture.

Keeping the neighborhood safe. That's all we was ever doing.

* * *

You'll notice I've put up some ads on the sidebar. I don't like looking at them either, but Paddy needs a new Wacom tablet. Realistically, they'll probably only amount to change, but as I've said before, I'm not in any position to pass up extra income, no matter how piddling. (Of course, there is a difference between piddling and nonexistent. We'll see if they stay up.)

Iranian Nukes & American Guns

I read a lot of editorial cartoons; over the past few years they've become an essential part of my morning "news and comics" routine. While I do enjoy reading all the preach-to-the-choir strips by progressive and liberal cartoonists, I often find it just as informative and enriching reading cartoons by artist on the other side of the aisle, which provide a valuable glimpse into the mind of the modern American conservative. For the most part, they're a daily collection of straw men, disproportionate metaphors, and crass caricatures employed to explain and justify the politics of fear, prejudice, oligarchy, dogma, and willful ignorance. (Many of them can be found collected by patriot Philip Pangrac on a Tumblr page which he has aptly titled "Shittiest Editorial Cartoon of the Moment.")

Lately I've had the displeasure of watching conservative cartoonists' "IRAN HAS NUKES AND WE MUST ATTACK IRAN" strips practically develop into their own genre. (Mr. Pangrac is collecting these separately over here.) This stuff is bad for my nerves, and I suspect that's precisely the cartoonists' intent. (It's called "fearmongering.") But I'm much less afraid of Iran maybe perhaps trying to possibly build a nuclear bomb than I am of the prospect of the United States getting embroiled in yet another war in the Middle East because a bunch of right-wingers on either side of the Atlantic are afraid of everyone else in the world.

Actually, what strikes me as especially odd about these cartoons -- and the right-wing efforts to goad the United States into another foreign policy catastrophe -- is that those in this country who vociferate loudest about the unacceptability of an Iranian nuclear program tend to be the same folks who think gun control laws are an abomination.

I wonder: Are these two stances logically consistent?

Whenever some nutjob walks into a public place and shoots a bunch of people, you can always expect Second Amendment partisans to posit that it might have been prevented if more armed citizens were on the scene. When they say this, they don't necessarily mean that the most plausible contingency would be a firefight in which the shooter got killed before he could squeeze off any more rounds; rather, they usually argue that someone would be much more reluctant to take out his divorce on the McDonald's breakfast line with a Glock if he could expect to find all his potential victims packing heat. Good sense, responsibility, and the threat of punishment regulate everybody's behavior, and there are fewer gun deaths despite there being more guns, runs their line of reasoning.

So how is demanding that Iran shouldn't be allowed to possess nuclear weapons reconcilable with this principle?

The world's a dangerous place, after all; plenty of nations are packing atom bombs. Why wouldn't Iran wish for the most powerful defense possible, especially when it's cultivated some seriously bad relationships with a pair of militaristic states with a history of aggression and intimidation? Putting aside geopolitical ramifications for a moment, isn't a nation entitled to protect itself with a deterrent proportional to the weapons with which its enemies might threaten it? How many ground wars, do you suppose, have been ruled out because of the threat of nuclear retaliation?

The Cold War mathematics of nuclear proliferation and M.A.D. bear a striking similarity to the arguments of the gun lobby, do they not?

Yeah, yeah, yeah -- but Iran is a crazy theocratic place run by crazy religious zealous who don't care if they all get burnt to cinders as long as Israel gets destroyed in the process. Somehow I don't think that's the case. If the Iranian regime was really that irrationally, obsessively, irresistibly compelled to attack Israel in spite of all consequences, one would think they'd be going at it already, nukes or no nukes. Why aren't they? Ah, right -- because they know their enemies would blow them back to the bronze age in retaliation. See? They're already demonstrating that they're not insane. (And as I understand it, that is the minimum requirement for gun ownership in the NRA's ideal America.)

Ad hominem: what members I've seen or met of America's most zealous Second Amendment proponents display an aberrance of behavior on par with your average crazy person or religious radical, and they unnerve me just as much.

If Glenn Beck is correct and the right to bear arms is endowed upon us by our capital-g God, doesn't that mean that the Iranians also have the right to build weapons to protect themselves from some very well-armed people down the lane who really don't like them? Couldn't we safely presume that if (and yes, it's still an "if") the Iranian regime is developing nuclear weapons, they would cite as their motivation the need for a defensive deterrent? (Well, part of their motivation, anyway -- the leverage that comes with being a nuclear-armed state has got to be pretty appealing. It could help explain why the United States built more warheads that it could ever conceivably use and why Israel built its bombs in secret, and doesn't seem that concerned with denying their existence.)

Again: for the moment I'm not interested in foreign policy particulars or solutions, but in consistency of principles. It's strange to assert a Creator-endowed right to bear arms in one breath, and then immediately stress the urgency of lobbing ordnance at a nation before it can arm itself with the same weapons we have. Do we really believe the freedom to arm ourselves is somehow exclusive to us (and our friends) because of a backwards sense of national exceptionalism or the belief that we're the favorite people of our favorite deity?

And why do claims like these only sound offensive and unreasonable to Americans when it's someone from another nation making them? 

*Comic at top by Sakai. Further citation details unavailable.

Of site crashings and book trashings

Two items on tonight's agenda.

If you got redirected here via 8easybits.net, this probably isn't what you were expecting (or wanting) to see. An explanation is in order!

About a month ago I got it in my head to transfer 8easybits.net to a different host. Transferring all the files seemed to go off without a hitch, but we hit a bit of a snag during the domain transfer -- which is why the site was down completely for a few days there. I ironed everything out with the new host, changed the DNS whatchacallems, and naïvely dared to hope that would be it, and everything would be up and running like it was on the old host.

Oops!

Something evidently went very, very wrong during the transfer. The site's engine is busted and I don't know how to fix it. The content is backed up in at least two different places, so there is no need to worry about any comics being lost. (The commentary might be another story, but I'm trying not to worry myself with more than one thing at a time.) But the borked CUSP setup is so obsolete that you can't even download it anymore, much less find a readme file -- not that I'd be able to make much use of it, anyway. I wasn't the person who set everything up to begin with, and I have absolutely no conception of how SQL or PHP is supposed to work. Unless somebody with a functional knowledge of this stuff feels like doing some pro-bono work for the sake of preserving history, 8easybits.net as we've known it for the past seven years is probably a memory.

So why did you change hosts to begin with, genius? you ask. First of all, the host I was using before kept upping its rates, and my income isn't exactly keeping pace. Secondly, I've been working on putting together a new comics site under a new domain. My plan was to use the new site for all the new comics, but to keep the complete 8EB archives in the same place for anyone to browse whenever they wished.

Again: oops.

Looks like we're stalled out for the time being. I'll probably rig up an archives page with some blog software at some point, but that will have to take a backseat to everything else I have planned. 8easybits.net will link to this (updated bi-weekly, usually!) blog until the new comics page is set up, which should be whenever I have a sufficient backlog to maintain a strict, once-per-seven-days update schedule for a three-month period. Until then, I'm afraid our soirees are restricted to the present format. (And do note that this is no longer the latest entry. Click the "Beyond Easy" banner up top to teleport your browser to the most recent update.)

I'm awfully sorry about this. And I'd also like to say that if you're still coming back to reread 8 Easy Bits from time to time, thank you very much -- I think that's really cool.

Moving on, then, to item two!

And now for the bad news.

The night raid on Occupy Wall Street's Zucotti Park camp put me in a really foul mood, which didn't get much better as more details kept coming in. What outraged and frightened me more than anything else were reports that the NYPD tore down the famous People's Library and threw the entire 5,000 book collection into a garbage truck. I felt as though a weight had been removed from my chest when word came in that the news of the library's destruction was premature.

Unfortunately, it seems that the report of the premature report was, in fact, premature.

When members of the encampment visited the garage on 57th Street to retrieve the books, they found the vast bulk of the collection missing. Much of what remains is damaged or practically destroyed -- almost as though it had been fished out of a garbage truck at the last minute.

So it would seem that that big rant I had prepared for Tuesday's update and then scrapped still applies. Jesus H. Christ. I would feel nothing but absolute, unalloyed horror at the NYPD's actions if the idiocy they've demonstrated weren't so confounding as to almost seem comical.

The kneejerk liberal reaction to events of this kind is to cry (or type, preferably in caps) police state, fascist pigs, etc., etc. Usually, I find this sort of epithet-hurling unhelpful, even when there is a grain (or a heap) of truth to the claims. But when city police go ahead and toss five-thousand-plus library books (and make no mistake -- even if it was not housed in a permanent structure or publicly funded, this was a library) into the back of a garbage truck, it takes more restraint than I possess to refrain from entertaining recollections of the world's Nazis, Maoists, Red Khmers, and every other representative of the elemental belligerence, intolerance, and ignorance that has been pissing on civilization like a territorial mutt in a flower garden since the torches were put to Alexandria.

Okay, so maybe it isn't very funny at all -- not even in a dark kind of way. But Bloomberg's bumbling attempt at a cover-up is freaking hilarious.

The announcement that the books were safe came from the Twitter account of Bloomberg's office. Why was the announcement necessary? Well, despite the NYPD's best efforts at a media blackout, news from the ground spread quickly via Twitter. When demonstrators tweeted about the loss of the library, major news outlets seized upon the story. (After all, government-sanctioned destruction of books is something that tends to strike at the public's nerves.) Bloomberg's office quickly claimed the library was intact in order to prevent the aforementioned Nazi parallels from drawing themselves.

When Bloomberg's office announced that the book were safe, a many of us (including myself) took them at their word. Why not? Given that the news of the library's destruction was aggressively put into circulation by the protestors themselves (and subsequently seized upon and propagated by mainstream news outlets), surely Bloomberg's office wouldn't be stupid enough to serve up a baldfaced lie about the status of the books and not anticipate the same people calling them on it, right? I mean, that's the kind of trick only a really, truly, profoundly, astonishingly, blitheringly dumb person would expect to work.

Almost as dumb, at any rate, as Bloomberg's responding to Thursday's demonstrations by insisting that the real story was that the turnout was lower than anticipated -- which is not only another blatant lie, but practically a challenge directed toward the demonstrators. It's the sort of thing a carnival clown shouts at people in line at the dunking booth in order to get them pissed off and ready to go.

Maybe Olbermann is right. Maybe Bloomberg is Occupy's man on the inside. Ever since Tuesday, he's done the movement nothing but favors, disguising them as antagonism. It has to be intentional. The three-term mayor of New York City cannot actually be this stupid, can he...?

#occupy Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Last night I went to sleep in a really foul mood. When I woke up, the first thing I did was check the news, so I began this morning in an even worse mood.

You've probably already seen the reports. You don't need to be told that Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD brought the truncheon down on the Occupy Wall Street camp at Liberty Square last night.
Some weeks ago, when touring the park and dropping off some supplies for the campers, my friend James ominously stated that the NYPD's budget outweighs that of some smaller nations' sovereign military forces. The scene that began at around 1:00 a.m. was practically a YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK exposition for the pleasure of New York's Republicans and sadists.

Nor should it be news to you that journalists were aggressively prevented from accessing the scene (and in several cases bullied) by the police, so most of what we know about the crackdown comes from Twitter, yfrog, and YouTube. You don't need to be told the stories of unprovoked beatings and gassings, wanton (hell, downright gleeful) destruction of protestors' property (tents and tarps were slashed, cameras and computers were broken, and I can only imagine how much donated food was chucked into the garbage trucks that pulled up to the park along with the police vans and sonic cannons), and the refusal of Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD to comply with a New York City judge's ruling to allow protestors back on the scene.

You don't need to be told. All of this is old news. Every columnist, blogger, and interested social media user has already reported the facts and weighed in, leaving your present armchair correspondent with precious little to contribute. Nevertheless, I don't think I'll be able to move on from the subject and thinking about something else until I've tossed my two cents (well, three) into the distended coin purse of Internet discourse.

FIRST CENT: THE FATE OF THE LIBRARY

Scratch that. Contrary to previous reports, the famous Liberty Square Library has not been destroyed, which makes the diatribe I had prepared (and its exquisite allusions to Alexandria) totally unnecessary. This would make me feel so much better about the whole thing were it not for....

FIRST CENT: JUDGE STALLMAN AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

This afternoon -- hours after a New York County Supreme Court Justice issued a restraining order against Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD -- Judge Micheal Stallman ruled that the demonstrators' first amendment rights do not permit them to camp out at the park indefinitely, and that the police crackdown (bulldozers, pepper spray, batons, and all) was all good and legal. And just like that, Liberty Square has reverted back to Zucotti Park -- for now. Protestors are being allowed back on the site, with the proviso that they can't build another campsite.

There's a whole lot about this to make one feel scared and upset, but on the whole, the movement probably stands to make a net gain from this. Just when the American attention span was in danger of flitting elsewhere, and a month before the merciless New York winter threatened to move in and kill the movement slowly and ignominiously, the Liberty Square occupation goes out with a great sound and fury that shocks the whole world into tuning back in.

For the time being, public assembly isn't altogether banned -- and if the Occupy crowd can muster the tenacity we've come to expect from them, they'll back, tents or no tents. Bloomberg and the NYPD just giftwrapped them a reason to press forward, and here's hoping they rise to the occasion.

SECOND CENT: MAYOR BLOOMBERG'S BONEHEADED STATEMENT

"We have been in constant contact with Brookfield [the park's owners] and yesterday they requested that the City assist it in enforcing the no sleeping and camping rules in the park," Bloomberg writes. "But make no mistake – the final decision to act was mine."

I can admit -- through a great deal of teeth grinding -- that Bloomberg's case, in its own limited context, is not an unreasonable one. But toward the end, there's a part I cannot read without biting my tongue:

Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.

A major motivating force of Occupy Wall Street was the fact that nobody who mattered -- lawmakers, executives, members of the mainstream media -- was listening when people tried to get a word in about America's growing income divergence and systemic flaws in its economic system over the noise about debt ceilings, job creators, and Kim Kardashian. Since writing blog posts, mailing letters, submitting articles to left-leaning magazines, and holding lectures wasn't convincing our greasy-palmed policymakers that economic injustice is a real and very serious national problem requiring an earnest solution, some people decided to find a more visible platform on which to air their grievances.

And now Bloomberg congratulates them on a good try and tells them their time is up. Two months is all they get before their platform gets yanked out from under their feet. Better luck changing the world next time, kiddies; also, you're welcome for the two months.

Putting aside the arguments about right to assembly, that last sentence is what really boggles my mind. If saying a thing like "now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments" with a straight face in a post-Citizens United America isn't absolutely daffy, it must be smug and malicious.

You already know about the Supreme Court's unfortunate ruling that handed America's oligarchic interests their own personal bullhorns and national P.A. systems for the sake of "free speech," so you don't need to be told. It was already the case that the entrenched minority could control the media, but Citizens United now allows them to pick and choose which politicians they want to see running for office, and spend however much money they want filling the airwaves with slander and misinformation.

Admittedly, that does read like a hyperbole. We're exactly not looking at a Netrunner future just yet -- but the point is that the wealthy have more free speech than the rest of the populace. They get to control the conversation. They pick what's on TV. They pick what's on the radio. They pick the issues our lawmakers are willing to fight for. Occupy Wall Street was a brilliant tactic towards leveling the playing field and circumventing the gatekeepers to introduce economic injustice into the national dialogue. (Before #occupy, you sure as hell didn't hear those words mentioned beyond "fringe" publications.)

Without a sustained public demonstration, we're back to "you've got your free speech and I'VE GOT MY FREE SPEECH." The encampment was precisely what gave the demonstrators the ability to make their case heard. Without that platform, the people who are driving the push for accountability in the financial industry and an America that isn't rigged against most of its citizens' interests are stuck trying to shout over the owners of the world's biggest megaphones.

THIRD CENT: TEABAGGERS AND TROLLS

I'm seriously starting to wonder if Karl Rove isn't cutting checks to people who troll CNN.com's user comments sections with "TAKE THAT HIPPIES OCCUPY A SHOWER WHY DONT YOU HA HA HA HA" bilge.

Earlier tonight I expressed this sentiment on another social media platform and received these responses from a distant acquaintance:

Karl Rove hasn't paid me shit. You'd be surprised how many people, myself included, who feel all this occupy nonsense is a waste of time. And furthermore that it is populated mostly by young academic types who can afford an ipad to tweet about their 'noble' endeavors. Most of those who are really getting fucked by the system are too busy actually going to work in order to feed their families to bitch about it. 

Of course there is a minority of haves and a minority [sic] of have-nots. That is how it has been since the dawn of civilization. Why should that suddenly change? And as for all the socialist idealists present at these protests, they need to wake up and realize that socialist and communist societies are just as guilty as capitalist ones of having extreme inequity between rich and poor. The only difference is that at least in capitalism you have an outside chance of making it into the privileged class with a mix of hard work and luck.

Compared to most of the rancorous gibberish I've been reading all day to furnish myself with excuses to take smoke breaks, this is positively constructive and reasonable.

But the point is that the sheer loathing directed towards the evicted Occupiers is astonishing. They're all stoners. They're all criminals. They're all basement-dwelling America haters. If they're not pampered, soft-handed academics, then they're penniless, filthy hippies. They're nothing but a bunch of whiners who don't understand how the world works. They should just get a $50,000 a year job with health benefits, like I did, because it's really just that easy.


Okay. Let's assume, for argument's sake, that the Occupy demonstrators really are nothing but a bunch of stoners, inexperienced students, unemployable burnouts, and messy hippies. Does this really make their grievances any less valid?

And to introduce some variety into our sources, let's look at a few numbers offered by FOX News' own Juan Williams. Thirty-nine percent of Americans fully approve of Occupy Wall Street. Seventy-six percent agree that the United States' economic structure disproportionately favors the wealthy. Fifty-five percent feel that income inequality is a significant national problem. Sixty-eight percent favor raising taxes on citizens earning more than $250,000 a year.

So why are we hurling epithets at the people -- be they hippies, stoners, slackers, or hell, even frustrated working stiffs -- who are making a serious effort to get America to notice and confront the fact that it has transformed into a de-facto oligarchy?

"Get a job," they're told by people who already have jobs, and choose to ignore the 16% underemployment rate and a minimum wage that has not kept pace with living expenses.

"Go out and vote," they're told by many of the same people who, in their next breath, complain about partisanship, gridlock, and the remarkable inability of Barack Obama to get even a god damn jobs bill passed during a period of widespread chronic unemployment.

Can you blame them for feeling as though the conventional avenues might not be a viable option?

And there's still more to this. A characteristically brilliant piece by Matt Taibbi hits the nail squarely on the head:

Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it....

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

Let's pull out our cultural barometer and see what's in the air right now.

The acquaintance we heard from above blithely admits that people are getting fucked by the system. We know and accept that our government is broken, our politicians are bought, and nobody in power has the balls to give our most pressing issues anything more than lip service; we understand that the Supreme Court has basically tossed aside judicial impartiality, but we're also aware that nobody will listen if we complain. We know that the bankers who crashed the economy have gotten off scot-free and are still making billions of dollars ripping off the have-nots and helping the haves turn their money into more money, and most of us are apparently perfectly willing to let this slide. We accept that climate change is going to drown our cities and decimate our agricultural capacity, and we're not doing a thing to prevent or prepare for it. We know the food we eat is probably killing us, but that's cool too. We know the folks in the board rooms at our inescapable multinational corporations care singularly about profits, but we've come to expect that from them and learned to live with it. We've embraced the emptiness of our culture to the extent that we now celebrate vacuous bullshit with a lack of irony that would make Andy Warhol's speed-addled brain turn somersaults, and we're tired of trying to resist it. You already know all this; you don't need to be told. Nobody approves of how things are going and nobody's happy with how they are, but we've convinced ourselves that we have no choice but to shake our heads, take our stress-reliever of choice, and get on with our lives as they are, because nothing we do will make an ounce of difference.

And when a motley group of students, hippies, literati, and urbanites devises a model (albeit temporary) alternative and propose that things should be and can be different, we castigate and tear them down for having the nerve not to resign themselves to the insufferable status quo that the rest of us invited on ourselves and continue to hoist upon our backs.

The losers had it coming. God bless America.

#occupymuseums: An Excercise in Imbecility

This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping the Occupy movement would not get itself into. An #OWS splinter movement (apparently with the approval of the main group) is sticking it to the Man at one of the main nerves of his plutocratic body politic: ART MUSEUMS.

Wait, what?

Let's try to wrap our heads around this one by taking a gander at Occupy Museums' call to action/manifesto:

The game is up: we see through the pyramid schemes of the temples of cultural elitism controlled by the 1%. No longer will we, the artists of the 99%, allow ourselves to be tricked into accepting a corrupt hierarchical system based on false scarcity and propaganda concerning absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitest of elite. For the past decade and more, artists and art lovers have been the victims of the intense commercialization and co-optation or art. We recognize that art is for everyone, across all classes and cultures and communities. We believe that the Occupy Wall Street Movement will awaken a consciousness that art can bring people together rather than divide them apart as the art world does in our current time…

Let’s be clear. Recently, we have witnessed the absolute equation of art with capital. The members of museum boards mount shows by living or dead artists whom they collect like bundles of packaged debt. Shows mounted by museums are meant to inflate these markets. They are playing with the fire of the art historical cannon while seeing only dancing dollar signs. The wide acceptance of cultural authority of leading museums have made these beloved institutions into corrupt ratings agencies or investment banking houses - stamping their authority and approval on flimsy corporate art and fraudulent deals.

For the last few decades, voices of dissent have been silenced by a fearful survivalist atmosphere and the hush hush of BIG money. To really critique institutions, to raise one’s voice about the disgusting excessive parties and spectacularly out of touch auctions of the art world while the rest of the country suffers and tightens its belt was widely considered to be bitter, angry, uncool. Such a critic was a sore loser. It is time to end that silence not in bitterness, but in strength and love! Because the occupation has already begun and the creativity and power of the people has awoken! The Occupywallstreet Movement will bring forth an era of new art, true experimentation outside the narrow parameters set by the market. Museums, open your mind and your heart! Art is for everyone! The people are at your door!

Okay. Right.

Since I am once again short on time this evening, we'll just be looking at a few quick points.

1.) If the artists of the 99% don't want to deal with a corrupt hierarchical system based on false scarcity and propaganda concerning absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitest of elite, they can just, you know...find other places to exhibit their work. Small urban galleries, perhaps? Public parks? Universities? The Internet? How about their own apartments? They could clear the furniture, distribute flyers, hang work on the walls, hand out wine and cheese on platters. That definitely seems like a more constructive use of their time to me.

This immediately strikes any reader who isn't a struggling artist himself as a personal gripe disguised as a political statement. "The false hierarchy of the cultural wing of the oligarchical puppet state won't exhibit my work, so their very existence must be wrong!" One might also suspect them of hitching a ride on a highly-publicized political movement to buy themselves some media attention.

2.) For the past decade and more, artists and art lovers have been the victims of the intense commercialization and co-optation or [sic] art, he says. How? This is not exactly a self-evident statement. Details, please? Explanations? Examples??

(When a truly persistent artist finds no market for his work, he takes it elsewhere instead of trying to burn down the market.)

3.) Why the fuck are you protesting the MoMA, of all places? It's not exactly turning tremendous profits. In fact, last I checked, it barely breaks even. What's these folks' beef, anyway?

An organizer tells a journalist that the place isn't necessarily bad, and the art isn't necessarily bad either, but he doesn't like having to pay $25 to get in.

The admissions price is a direct consequence of the MoMA's not receiving any government funding. Even if you want to put your fingers in your ears for the conversation about the United States' tremendous federal budget deficits and national debt, are you really willing to blame an institution for not wanting to exist at the mercy of Congress?

And before you bitch about its entry fee, why don't you go look at its membership plans? Hey, look! You can pay $75 a year for a membership, which allows you to support an establishment that offers great works of art for public viewing (which would probably otherwise be locked up in some billionaire's mansion), come and go as you please at no further cost, and bring a friend along at an 80% reduction in price!

Maintaining an art gallery of the MoMA's size ain't cheap. The "exorbitant" entry fees help pay for staff salaries, security, site maintenance, power (climate control is equally important for the art is it is for the comfort of the visitors), property taxes, etc. But that's what it costs to keep so many pieces by so many highly-sought artists under the same roof for public exhibition.

4.) The members of museum boards mount shows by living or dead artists whom they collect like bundles of packaged debt. Shows mounted by museums are meant to inflate these markets. They are playing with the fire of the art historical cannon while seeing only dancing dollar signs.

Oh! He played on the homonymity between the words "canon" and "cannon." Cute! (Or maybe he actually misspelled "canon" and I'm giving him too much credit.)

But still, what? I would think that an effective manifesto should give detailed reasons for a party's grievances than just assume everyone is already aware of them -- especially when they're so abstract.

5.) If you don't like the records the mainstream labels are releasing, stop buying them and look for music elsewhere. If you don't like what the museums are displaying and promoting, PATRONIZE DIFFERENT MUSEUMS. Better yet, start an art blog, find some like-minded contributors, and promote stuff that's beneath the museums' radar. (Something similar worked pretty well for a little music blog called "Pitchfork," didn't it?) This would also be much more productive (not to mention tasteful) than taking advantage of a public protest about economic injustice to draw attention to yourself.

6.) Okay, wait. Maybe what he's saying is that the wealthy have a disproportionate influence on what's hot and what's not in the art world. Probably -- but first of all, that's nothing new. If you're in the business of art and want to make money, you make art that appeals to people who have money. Otherwise, you make art for the love of it and be grateful for the chance to do it. And secondly, who gives a crap? Find different patrons, go to different museums, blah blah blah.

Economic injustice is a matter of widespread concern because all aspects of a nation's life exist in the context of its economic state. This is why #occupy is important and necessary. Not being able to find a job after ten months of looking is a pretty good reason to take to the streets. Not being able to see your and your friends' paintings on display in the Museum of Modern Art because of the pyramid schemes of the temples of cultural elitism kind of, well, isn't. And it's really no reason to get in someone's way and make a lot of noise when they're taking the day off to visit the MoMA with a friend from out of town. That's not going to endear them to your cause, and it certainly won't make them look at #occupy in a positive light.

I wouldn't care about this in the least if it didn't reflect so poorly on #occupy as a whole.

The Occupy movement actually seems to be endorsing these people, which has the potential to be extremely counterproductive (provided Occupy Museums doesn't just fizzle out in a week). If #occupy wants to affect serious policy changes, it needs mainstream support, and not just the reliable backing of the young and far-left. Frivolous side-projects like Occupy Museums only add discordance to a movement that already receives enough criticism for its lack of a unified message and set of actionable demands. (Side note: a specific demand may be forthcoming.)

Having an #occupy endorsement stamped on self-indulgent abstractia like Occupy Museums just provides the CNN and FOX News personalities with ammunition. It exposes the movement to ridicule after all the work it has done to demonstrate that it represents more than just the usual protest crowds (kids, hippies, academics, privileged hipsters, etc.).

I brought this up on Occupy Wall St.'s Facebook page earlier today, but it scrolled out of sight within ten minutes. One response I got (before my post was buried) went like:

We really don't care if msm takes this seriously. Our seriousness isn't dependent on their interpretations

No, but your results are. Unless you want all your time and effort to amount to nothing more than a three-month street fair, you damn well better care how the wider public perceives you.

Occupy needs to stay on message. Economic Injustice. Economic Injustice. Economic Injustice.

The movement can't afford to be defined by the pet causes of its fringe elements -- I seem to recall something like that happening to the Tea Party around the same time it began to sink out of favor with the silent majority. Once the public begins tuning out #occupy as a bunch of manifesto-touting, overacademized weirdos, the conversation will change, policymakers will turn their attention elsewhere, and that will be that. And I don't want this to happen.

#occupywallstreet: Arguments, Ruminations, Photographs

As Occupy Wall Street endures, so too does the "web blog sphere" chatter about Occupy Wall Street. If you're sympathetic to the movement (I think it has lasted for a sufficiently long time, attracted enough supporters, and spread to enough cities that we can appropriately refer to it as a "movement"), you will not mind. If you're trying to tune it out, I'm afraid you'll have to put up with it for at least a little longer.

The fact that Occupy Wall Street is calling attention toward a fundamentally broken component of American society is reason enough to at least pay attention to it, even if you can't totally support it. After all, the United States is a nation that doesn't snap out of its mass media and toy-induced coma very often, and this is especially true of its young people. The "Occupy" movement suggests that maybe Generation Y does in fact have a pulse, and despite whatever reservations I might have about the demonstrators' means and ends, what we're seeing is definitely preferable to watching the thousands of them shrugging, going back inside, and tweeting their minute-by-minute reactions to the new episode of Jersey Shore.

Yesterday (Sunday) afternoon I stopped by Zuccotti Liberty Park with James to drop off some food, clothing layers, and bedding for the campers before heading back toward Pennsylvania. Apart from mentioning the almost unbelievable increase in the demonstrators' numbers since my first visit, there is little I did or observed that some other local blogger hasn't already discussed himself, or that the photographs James has been taking throughout the week (some of which you can see below) can't illustrate with less verbiage and more eloquence.

Right when Occupy Wall Street began making the news about two weeks ago, my friend Jen and I shared our views on the matter over dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, and really got on each other's nerves. It spilled out into an email exchange that tapered off after we both got tired of being mad at each other, but Jen did raise some points to which I never had a chance to respond. I'd like to take a look at a few of them here -- but it bears mentioning that this isn't a case of me wanting to pick a fight and revive a disagreement (sup Jen). I just think some of Jen's points make useful starting lines for discussion.

Let's begin! 

Most of the corporations out there are providing commercial products/services or are supported by the public in some shape or form.

Again, personal responsibility.

It's good that they're out there voicing their opinions and making their concerns heard, but they probably don't consistently patron companies that are socially and economically responsible. If they did, these companies wouldn't be struggling to make a profit and this whole corporate-greed thing wouldn't be a problem.

Before we start looking at the legitimacy of her main point, I have a bone to pick about the "personal responsibility" chorus. Why should it only cut one way?

I worked at a Borders store for three years. When the company started having financial troubles, employee hours got cut; the worse things got, the less we worked. Perks were systematically eliminated. There was a "temporary" freeze on employee wages that ended up lasting for the remainder of the company's existence.

This in itself isn't the reason why many former Borders employees are so bitter. After all, when money is tight, everyone in the house has to make sacrifices. But in this case, it was the store employees who were made to absorb the splashback resulting from executive incompetence.

My friend Anna (a former member of the management staff at Borders' King of Prussia Mall location) can give us a few names and numbers, since her ear was much closer to the wall than mine:

(11:27:19 PM) annatheclamma: hmmmmmm
(11:27:22 PM) annatheclamma: well
(11:27:58 PM) annatheclamma: I think our wage freeze started in 2007
(11:28:18 PM) annatheclamma: in that time, we had george jones as a ceo
(11:28:28 PM) annatheclamma: who got ousted, but got a bonus when he left
(11:28:32 PM) annatheclamma: then ron marshall came in
(11:28:43 PM) annatheclamma: got a bonus upon being hired, and one upon being fired
(11:29:06 PM) annatheclamma: then mike edwards came in, who got a bonus with the promotion, and a severance package even after the bankruptcy
(11:31:09 PM) annatheclamma: I know everything was filed with the sec
(11:31:50 PM) annatheclamma: mike edwards got 125,000 in severance
(11:32:27 PM) annatheclamma: wait the top 4 execs each got $125,000
(11:32:32 PM) annatheclamma: just in severence
(11:32:47 PM) annatheclamma: from a bankrupt company that gave its workers nothing in severance
(11:33:51 PM) annatheclamma: george jones got 2.09 million in severance
(11:35:05 PM) annatheclamma: I was there for 5 years and made $10.75 an hour
(11:35:10 PM) annatheclamma: completely fair

Why do I get the feeling practices such as these aren't especially unusual, given how similar it sounds to reports of lavish post-bailout bonuses across the financial sector? And why is it that only the wealthy are allowed to lecture the lower classes on the issue of personal responsibility?

But we've already veered from Jen's main point, which was about how it is upon the concerned consumer to patronize the right businesses and eschew the "wrong" ones, and I cannot dispute this. Nor can I argue with the fact that we essentially voted in Exxon, Bank of America, and Wal-Mart, despite never actually pulling a lever for them in any ballot box. None of these huge corporations with questionable ethics would have ever made it big unless large numbers of people hadn't willingly directed portions of their incomes toward purchasing their services or swag.

Participating in public demonstrations, getting the word out, making yourself heard, and, yes, even voting in public elections are all important toward creating the momentum that carries reform.

But all of these are relatively easy and quick methods of trying to foment social change -- and real change is never easy, and it most certainly isn't quick, especially not where systemic reform is concerned.

A tremendous majority of the population adheres to a lifestyle that pumps money into the coffers of multinational corporations, many of which don't necessarily behave in ways a responsible, respectable person should be expected to. (If corporations want to be treated as "entities," i.e., people in our legal system, I see no reason not to hold them to the standards to which we hold any United States resident.)

We can bitch about the evils perpetrated by oil companies, but our whining doesn't make a difference if, for all our righteous umbrage, we're driving fifty miles back and forth to the office every day and taking the car to cover any distance greater than half a mile. We can lament the decline of the manufacturing sector, the death of locally-owned shops, and the rise of wage slavery, but our grievances ring hollow when we willingly support businesses like Wal-Mart (which contribute to these problems) out of frugality or convenience. 

Smaller retailers exist, just like better companies do. You and most Americans are too lazy to seek them out, or refuse to spend extra money to buy them. It's not worth your effort or the inconvenience to look on the internet for a small bookstore (despite your claims, they do exist - like the Strand, and a couple of ones in New Brunswick, there's one that i go to in Watchung Plaza), research the companies that you choose to buy products from, or utilize the services of many smaller independent companies on the internet, but its easy to blame the worlds woes on something bigger and more powerful than you.

I actually think this speaks for the necessity of the changes for which Occupy Wall Street's anti-corporate core is pushing.

Let's say you're living out in the suburbs somewhere. You want to buy a new pair of shoes, but would also like to keep true to your newfound sense of social responsibility. You establish a small set of criteria for the shoes you buy and the store from which you buy them. First, it is necessary that you can be completely positive that the shoes were not assembled by child laborers or sweatshop workers, and you would also prefer that they were made in America. You consider yourself an environmentalist, so you want to invest in a company you can be assured isn't just offering consumers a shallow "we've gone green!" platitude and is actually taking significant, proactive steps toward curbing their emissions. And since you yourself are an unpaid intern, a retail worker, or are attending graduate school, it is no less important that these shoes are affordable.

So: where do you go to buy these shoes?

Even if somebody wants to adopt more responsible purchasing habits, it is EXTREMELY difficult to practice them. Finding an accessible business that's committed to screwing over as few people and leaving as small an ecological footprint as possible can be flat-out impossible, unless you happen to live in a major urban center.

("Where do you find them? The Internet, duh!" someone has suggested. Hm. Well, remember that we are making our imaginary purchase as environmentalists trying to minimize our carbon footprint, and the jury is apparently still deliberating the emissions output of a shopping trip vs. the emissions output of home delivery, but excellent point. That duh was well-deserved.)

On Sunday evening, James recounted an argument he had with someone who got a kick out of pointing out that he supported Occupy Wall Street despite keeping a checking account with TD Bank, carrying a BlackBerry in his pocket, and stopping by Subway for lunch. James argues that there is no double standard: he can patronize particular businesses, he argues, and still lobby for tightened regulations and business reform. This makes James something of a moderate within the Occupy Wall Street ideological spectrum: he doesn't believe the whole commercial landscape needs to be altogether bulldozed, but nevertheless requires some overdue pruning and edging.

But let's assume James is incorrect, and the only ethically consistent path of action is for him to withdraw all his money, cancel his credit cards, get rid of his phone, eat only organic, locally-prepared foods, patronize only locally-owned business, only purchase products that he knows were manufactured by companies concerned about human rights and environmental impact. What can he do? 

I'm sure there are people who would be fine koombayaa-ing around a campfire and hanging around drum circles in their free time, good for them. But you can't expect everyone to want to live like they did in the olden days in simple housing constructs eating vegetables that they pick from gardens that they grow themselves.

Individual conclusions will vary -- but if we really are looking at a binary choice, it seems tragic that it must be one.

I've met and spent time with a handful of people who, when faced with this one-or-the-other dilemma, chose The Other. These are the people who go completely off the grid. They drift, they join communes, they squat, they get their food and clothes from dumpsters. In brief, they effectively sever themselves from society. They can't "vote" with their dollars to support sustainable and ethical businesses because they have no money. No mainstream politicians represent their interests. They are pretty much excluded from public discourse; after all, who cares what some dirty, dreadlocked bums have to say about anything?

We have wandered into a point where we are essentially required to support multinational, profit-fixated, too-big-to fail businesses in order to participate in mainstream culture. When the thinking man's pair of alternatives is either enduring the prickings of his conscience (which consumer spending can nicely numb) or self-imposed exile and asceticism, what's the easier choice to make? (Thus, we call the ones who make the hard choice "crazy people.")

The media has been mentioning an announcement made by Occupy Wall Street's "organizers" -- even though, in reality, the person responsible is not affiliated with OWS's planners and corrallers -- encouraging supporters to simulataneously withdraw all their money from the Big Banks on November 5. I'm not sure precisely how much the banks might stand to lose from something like this this (it's not as though the people supporting Occupy Wall Street control a big slice of the national wealth, which is sorta why they're protesting to begin with -- but never mind that), but let's say, for argument's sake, that for some reason enough people do cancel their checking and savings accounts, taking enough money out of the banks to do them some serious damage. (Again, this is not likely.)

What would happen then?

Probably nothing good. Shockwaves would diffuse throughout the economy; companies enact another round of layoffs, consumer spending decreases, more companies begin laying off more people as a result, the stock market plunges, wealth is lost across the board, and the threat of a double-dip recession stops being just a threat. (Or maybe nothing happens at all? Who knows?)

But we'll imagine that this is a real and likely possible result if enough people follow through and stop patronizing the Big Banks on November 5th. Upon first glance, threatening to derail the (agonizingly slow) economic recovery in order to make a point might seem irresponsible and perhaps even terroristic -- but remember that these people are not threatening the government, civil institutions, or the populace itself. They are threatening to stop patronizing a set of for-profit commercial institutions. Free market logic not only gives this sort move the okay, but actually encourages it: everyone has the right to take their business elsewhere, after all. This is one of the very pillars of our economic system.

But where are we when, by taking their business elsewhere, a crowd of discontented consumers could actually endanger the public good? (Remember Too Big to Fail?)

Something is undeniably rotten when we have to support certain commercial institutions in order to preserve the welfare of the state. It is equally vile that we must make a choice between patronizing these businesses or otherwise living on the fringes of society (if that is indeed the reality of the situation).

Economic inequality remains the issue on which Occupy Wall Street keeps its focus. But, really, this isn't just an economic problem: the culture itself is in need of reform. 

Granted, most corporations certainly need a massive slap in the face, but if those principles were applied to everything (even good businesses), there wouldn't be much of an incentive left to take risks and start a business if there's a massively oppressive cap to how much they can gain from it and if the chance of going bankrupt is dramatically higher.

Again, this implies the duplicitous narrative that only two alternatives exist: either business becomes almost totally deregulated and everyone gets to have money again, or else excessive and pointless regulations will make it impossible for anyone to ever make money again.

I refer to you a cartoon that has been making the rounds lately:

We've been imposing regulations and reforms upon businesses for years, and it doesn't look to me like business is doing all that horribly -- at least, not where the multinationals are concerned. It is more accurate to claim that excessive regulation can hamper small businesses, which is why regulation cannot be one sided: the legal reforms that compel businesses to behave more responsibly must be drafted, implemented, monitored, and, if need be, modified with the utmost diligence and responsibility. (After all, it is no less duplicitous to suggest that all regulation is necessarily helpful regulation.)

There is no recipe or guidebook for such procedures; no universally-applicable principle by which we can strike that balance between too much or too little regulation in every case. But it is counterproductive and pointless to squabble over whether it should be all or it should be nothing instead of putting in the difficult and necessary work of finding a suitable mean.

And now, in the interest of the public good, I am going to step down from the soap box and turn the rest of this update over to James and his camera.

More pretty pictures might come later. I'll point you toward higher-res versions as soon as James makes them publicly available.